On 08/13/2011 08:26 AM, David Swafford wrote: > I'm borrowing a room at mom's place for this presently :-D, as the 1 > bedroom apartment was a bit too small!
I've got a two bedroom apartment currently. Seriously considering a 3 bedroom place. So I can have a dedicated server room/office and a guest room. Right now guest room serves as server room and living room is the office. > It has 2 racks -- a 2post and a full server cabinent. The racks are > physically on separate sides of the room, so I've got a custom cable > tray running along the walls, that's about a foot below the ceiling. Nice. Another reason that apartments are annoying. Limited mods. Though one could make the mods and just patch holes when they leave. I wanted to drill a hole to the outside at my apartment and patch when we left. The wife said no. LOL. It's cool though, cause she doesn't bat an eye when I mention buying a 72U rack. :) > Between the racks are 24-port patch panels for cross-connect needs. Hmmm. Between racks you mean? Or from ports in wall to switch? > Power is the fun part: I installed a 50AMP, 240V, subpanel in the > above room (with permits/inspection), and am feeding 1 x 240 to each > rack and also 1 x 120 to the 2-post. Ah yes. Power. This is what will drive me to a colo. I'm sure of it. I don't want to rely on household wiring for heavy duty loads. > Each rack's power is handled by > remotely managed power controllers. I've found that maintaining UPS > batteries became too expensive, given the age and present value of my > gear, so everything is direct w/o UPS support. Since I've got full > power control, most of the gear remains off until I'm actively using > it for studies. Excellent. This is what I do as well. Though the PDUs that I picked up don't work with my current wiring. :( > To conserve electric use, I rarely use additional AC, > though I have a portable unit in the room for when the need arises -- > average temp runs about 85 in that room. Nice. > The routing gear is a mix of Cisco 2600s, 3600s, and 4500s (yep, those > are a little old!); The switching gear is a mix of Cisco 3550s, 3560s, > and 2950s; The server gear is mostly IBM xSeries, in the age range of > about 5-7 years old. Perfectly suitable for a wide variety of applications. Only things worth swapping out on a regular basis are drives. > Connectivity from my apartment to the lab is over a site-to-site VPN. What kind of bandwidth in between? > I've also got a Cisco call manager express (on a 1760) running my > mom's phone service and have phones throughout her house and my > apartment. Nice. I've not dabbled with Cisco voip at all. Just Freeswitch/Asterisk (abandoned Asterisk and exclusively Freeswitch these days). > Production storage is on a QNAP NAS back at my apartment. I believe this is the second mention of QNAP in this thread. > The above room is about 180 square feet. It sits next to the garage > and kitchen, and to make it look more official I took out the door and > replaced it w/ a plastic doorway like you see in big grocery freezers. > The plastic made it easier to get in/out with gear without scratching > up the house and it also helps mute out some of the fan-noise. Excellent idea. Do you have a ramp of some sort to bring gear in? -- Charles N Wyble char...@knownelement.com @charlesnw on twitter http://blog.knownelement.com Building alternative,global scale,secure, cost effective bit moving platform for tomorrows alternate default free zone.
